The TRANSDRIFT l expedition was part of the joint Russian-German ARCTIC '93 Expedition. During this campaign in the northern Laptev Sea the interdisciplinary research programs of the R/V Polarstern of the Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Germany and the Ivan Kireyev of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute of St. Petersburg, Russia, were closely coordinated. Dredges and cores taken have revealed numerous thin manganese crusts covering worm tubes, abundant thicker crusts on bivalve shells and stones, as well as some massive manganese nodules found in the eastern Laptev Sea.

From 1983 until 1989 NOAA-NCEI compiled the NOAA-MMS Marine Minerals Geochemical Database from journal articles, technical reports and unpublished sources from other institutions. At the time it was the most extended data compilation on ferromanganese deposits world wide. Initially published in a proprietary format incompatible with present day standards it was jointly decided by AWI and NOAA to transcribe this legacy data into PANGAEA. This transfer is augmented by a careful checking of the original sources when available and the encoding of ancillary information (sample description, method of analysis...) not present in the NOAA-MMS database.